Cultivating Chaos: Entropy, Information, and the Making of the Dictionary of National Biography

The Dictionary of National Biography, published between 1885 and 1900, was one of Britain's biggest cyclopedia projects. The rampant expansion of the nation's archives, private collections, and museums produced an abundance of materials that frustrated the dictionary's editors, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, especially because methodologies for making order of such materials were underdeveloped. Adding to their frustration was the sense of impending doom felt generally in Britain after the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics in 1859. Entropy put an end to the presiding belief in the infinite energy that fueled Britain's economic development and therefore challenged Victorian biography's premise that the capacity for self-development was boundless. Like the physicists of the era, these dictionary makers searched for ways to circumvent entropy's deadening force and reenergize their world. This project would not actually be achieved, however, until the twentieth century when Claude Shannon published his “Information Theory” in 1948. I argue that in an attempt to get out from under the chaos of information overload, the editors of the DNB invented new methods to organize information that anticipated Shannon's revolutionary theory and changed the way that we think, write, and work.

UKRAINIAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY ARCHIVE (2000–2020): TRANSFORMATION OF CONTENT

The purpose of the article is to present the process of formation of a biographical resource, to depict the current state of its updated version - the electronic Ukrainian National Biographical Archive (UNBA) to analyze the changes that occurred during 2000-2020 in the formation of the biographical array of the database (DB) "Personalities" - a fundamental component of the electronic UNBA. The methodology consists of a combination of general scientific methods of analysis of theoretical material and statistical and comparative methods of analysis of specific empirical data, their systematization, and generalization. The scientific novelty of the study is characterized by obtaining unique information about the dynamics of the distribution of UNBA personnel - important figures of Ukrainian culture - by thematic headings, chronological periods, gender distribution. Conclusions. Formed by UNBA, today is the largest national electronic biographical resource. The emergence of modern sources in Ukraine, which open to the reader new, undeservedly forgotten, silent for various reasons, contributes to a large-scale change in the volume of biographical resources. Qualitative processing of these sources significantly multiplies the UNBA register, significantly increases its informative aspect. The analysis showed the versatility of the presented information on its thematic, chronological, gender distribution. In addition, it identified problems that should be taken into account when further filling the resource, in particular the significant uneven distribution of personnel by domain and article, incomplete chronological information about births, deaths, and burials, insufficient attention to biographical sources before the XIX century.

Renaming and Reclaiming Urban Spaces in Ukraine: The Perspective of Internally Displaced People

For more than six years, Ukrainian society has been constantly searching for ideas as to how to write a new “national biography.” In a society divided by armed conflict, the so-called decommunization process is considered to be an idea capable of uniting a nation. This process started back in 2015, with the passing of a specific law that required not only the deconstruction of Soviet-time monuments in public spaces, but also a huge decommunization of place names. The article will explore the main practices of place (re-)naming during the different stages of the decommunization (but not de-ideologization) of spaces, as well as describing the problems that may emerge in society as a result of a rapid transition from one narrative to another. Based on a case study of spatial identities of internally displaced people, I am going to answer the question of how people perceive renamed spaces, and how they reclaim and re-appropriate these spaces in the midst of an identity crisis.

Orlando’s Unseen Face

In this essay, I propose to complicate the paradigm of circulation through a close look at a case in which a unique life story, of the sexually ambiguous Chevalier d’ Éon (1728–1810), crosses back and forth across generic as well as national boundaries, reaching a nodal point when he receives an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography edited by Virginia Woolf’s father, and then becomes the model for her hero/ine Orlando. The Chevalier has never before been discussed by Woolf scholars, who have paid little attention to Woolf’s foreign intertexts, but a broader understanding of the concept of circulation as developed by David Damrosch, Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova will help me reveal the route of this hidden source from France to Russia and then to England, and can enable us to see Woolf’s gender- and genre-bending novel as a prime example of globality and worldliness.

David Hume in Chicago: A Twentieth-Century Hoax

This article alleges that two letters attributed to the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) were forged in the twentieth century. The letters were first published in 1972 and 1973 by Michael Morrisroe, an assistant professor of English in the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, after which they became monuments of conventional scholarship on Hume's life and writings. Both letters are cited without qualification by scholars of Hume's thought in dozens of publications, including Ernest Campbell Mossner's celebrated Life of David Hume (1980), and John Robertson's entry for Hume in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). This article reconstructs the history and transmission of Hume's extant letters and attempts to account for why the forgeries published by Morrisroe were accepted as genuine. It makes a systematic case against the authenticity of the letters, and focuses in particular on the question of whether Hume met the Jansenist homme de lettres Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688–1761) and had access to his library, in Reims, in 1734. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the exposé for modern editorial scholarship and intellectual history.

American National Biography

American National Biography provides access through a subscription to biographies of over 19,000 historical figures that helped to shape American history. The biographies span from pre-World War II to the present, with an emphasis on historical and cultural figures. The price varies and is based on subscription type and institution or a personal subscription, but primarily on number of users. The interface could use improvement in its advanced search features, response to queries, and incorporating automated responses. But searchability by occupation is a benefit. The content is ideal for basic research, serving needs of schools, the public, academics, and individuals with its concise content on each individual.